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Get ready for some fireworks. This one's gonna be a fun one!!! There are some really fast swimmers in most of the events, making the final heats some real showdowns. I'm really looking forward to the 200 IM heat. In the top 6, Kirk, That Guy, myself, and a couple others are going to have a race. The 500 free is another good showdown with Kirk at the end of the meet.
I'm in 200 fly, 200 IM, 100 back, 100 breast, & 500 Free
Here's a copy of the psych sheet for all to view. Enjoy.

I am off to meditate before bed. I tried to do it earlier but aborted due to phone call, cats, and finally just giving up!

PS--I recently received a color "Nook" from Barnes and Nobles for a gift. Does anyone have one of these readers? Do you like it? I'm not sure if I should keep it or trade it for a Kindle. I really don't know anything about either of them.

It was a clear and warm night, and for the first time at this winter there were non-swimteam kids just playing in the pool during our workout time. During my set of 25s two small girls a couple of lanes over were having a lengthy discussion about whether to be fairies or mermaidsóit was very sweet. The sun set and full moon rose during the course of the workout, and I did most of my kick without a board so I could watch them. Iíll be back for more tomorrow morning, and it made me happy to think that they will be too, just with their places swapped in the morning sky. Itís really cool that workout times this time of year coincide with the prettiest times of day.

Iíve ventured into the gulf for increasingly longer times the last few days. Today I was in for about half an hour, mostly swimming back and forth in front of the place where Iím staying. I got a water temp reading on my thermometer of 62, although the newspaper still claims itís 56. I think on sunny days the shallow water near shore has warmed up considerably by the time I venture out in the afternoon. If conditions are good this weekend (and theyíre supposed to be) Iím hoping to go for a longer parallel-to-shore swim Iíve measured on google maps.

kinda modified this practice to be more like a fast friday practice incase I miss tomorrow morning.

Whitney sent this scheduling Email a couple days ago
Subject: [txla-masters] master's schedule
There is NO Friday noon this week but we WILL have Thursday noon instead.
Saturday 7-8:30 am at Dick Nichols
Sunday 12-1:15 at UT; the marathon is on Sunday so traffic will be challenging plan accordingly.

There are swim meets at UT (Conference & American Short Course) starting next Wednesday. Both of these big meets will impact our practice schedule. I will update you as soon as I know what they will be.

we did this part of the main set in the main center course section and had BLOCKS
assigned: 20 x 50 fr on 1:00 Fast, best average
Did: 20 x 50 on 1:00 odds easy evens fast from a dive
went 25 on #1, 25's on 2 - 9 & 23 on 10

200 easy

Moved to side warm up areas: NO BLOCKSassigned: 10 x 100 fr on 2:00 Fast best average
Did: odds fast evens easy
went 56, 55, 55, 55, 54

100 easy

[B]assigned 5 x 200 fr on 4:00 Fast best average
DID: went in with the plan to swim 1, 3, & 5 fast, but I was hurting from doubling
on 1 I dove in and felt weak and terrible so I stopped at the 150 in 1:32
on 3 I felt bad again so I stopped at the 100
in 59
on 5 I decide to kick it
felt pretty bad & stopped at the 150 went 1:41

4050 scy
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A few weeks ago Coach Steve had me learn a couple of drill's to keep my elbows high and increase my rotation on my freestyle. The net result was a increased learning curve that has slowed my FR down. Im used to swinging my arms over with low elbows, and a 45 degree from center axis body rotation. A surfboard stroke. I was getting faster with it; 10x100 FR 1:09's on 1:30 intervals. Now, I'm coming in on 1:24. Having to rotate 90 degrees to the left and 90 degree's to the right, keeping my arm tucked in with my elbow high and trying to coordinating my kicking pattern has kept me busy. Sometimes I can feel it, but most of the time its a chore.
I finally learned how to do a proper breaststroke kick a couple of month's ago, but learning it late in life has caused considerable pain to the ligaments in my knees.
My BR has slowed while my knees painfully adjust. Both coaches understand what I'm going through, with the BR and the FR. "Just keep practicing".
It hailed a few times during practice in our outdoor " nanatorium", in between sets I put a kick-board or paddle on my head, a "hail hat".
It quickly spawned imitators!

Taper appears to be gone now. I struggled a lot on the 300's. Might be due to a lack of warm-up. Worked on freestyle stroke w/ my right arm. Apparently, I'm recovering too wide which is allowing my hand to slide outward as I pull throught the stroke. Also worked on keeping my backstroke kick faster w/ smaller amplitude. I think it helped but I felt very out of synch.

Whew! Today was a long day. Work all day, swim solo immediately after work, home to meditate for 50 minutes, quick dinner, 1st annual PE1 Blog-cast for 1 hour at 9:00 pm.
Now I'm going to and hopefully drift off to sleep so I can turn around and do it again tomorrow!

Felt flattened from the long day of drylands and the deep tissue. Decided to take a pure recovery day. These days are just ungodly boring, but they seem to be necessary for me to recover and they curb my natural impulse to overtrain. Tomorrow is an off day with appointments and errands and hopefully I'll be ready to kick Speedo's butt on Friday.

Tuesday turned out to be a triple-dip day. After my morning lcm workout, I dipped/floated/paddled around in the gulf in the afternoon (water tempís back up to 60, air was a little above that), then went to evening workout with the Panama City Beach masters. (If I counted the hot tub, I guess I could claim a quadruple-dip day.) There was a gorgeous sunset to watch during the first part of evening workout. Hereís what I did:

Then this morning I was back at the pool for LC team workout. My left adductor was a little twingy from the breaststroke work last night, so I was limited to free, back, and fly. I always miss IM so much when I canít do it! Hereís the workout I did:

600 lcm warmup (200s, 200k, 200d)

8 x 50 (25 build, 25 ez) @ 1:00, odds FR, evens BK [The sun was just coming up during this set, and I was glad to have an excuse to stop at the other end of the pool, which has the better view of the eastern sky.]

4 x 100 drill, assorted strokes, @ 2:00

2 x 200 FR pull @ 3:10, descend by 50s within each 200

400 FR negative split [6:00 (3:04, 2:55)]

2 x 200 kick @ 4:45

4 x 100 drill, assorted strokes, @ 2:00

8 x 50 FR ďstingersĒ @ :10 rest, with fins [The idea on these was to go as hard as possible on all of them. It was as awful as it sounds.]

That was the end of the team practice, but the pool was so lovely and sunny that I didnít want to get out. So I did the following long easy free ladder:

200/400/600/800/1000 FR, with 1:00 rest between swims

The long swims were really calming and hypnoticóI was surprised how much I enjoyed them. After I was done, I still didnít want to get out of the pool, but I was also feeling a bit arm-weary, so I contented myself with

200 easy swimdown/floating/basking

That was it.

Two final notes from last weekendís meet:

∑ PMcCoy has very kindly posted a couple of videos of races that include me. In the first ([nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fZT5vlpmIg"]YouTube - E09H03 400IM[/nomedia]), Iím the 4th lane from the bottom, in the white cap (with the glacial turnover on fly). In the 2nd one ([nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nfY1eUiRrI"]YouTube - E07H08 200FR[/nomedia]), Iím 5th from the bottom, still in the white cap. Any comments or suggestions welcome!

∑ Auburn was the last meet for my fave meet suitóit developed several bald patches, and will have to be retired. Iíd had this suit for nearly 4 years, so Iíve probably gotten more swims out of it than any meet suit should have to endure. Still, I was pretty sad about retiring it, until Mr. Addict reminded me that its demise means more swimsuit shopping! If anyone comes across a pretty and functional knee suitóthe more distinctive the betteróplease let me know! (Wouldn't it be cool if Splish offered custom ordered knee suits in their fun patterns.)

I just looked online at the entries list of swimmers for the Lake Wash. Meet this Sunday, and there are 157 online people!!! That's huge!!! Plus however many more entered by mail. Gonna be a big meet. At least I'll have some R & R between events.

I'm back to only swimming for an hour a morning again. Work put me back to 6:30am start time, but I still get to swim which is good.